Just to replace it with what he calls "payment verified", which basically means you have 8$ and means to send it to twitter. Which apparently is worth less than nothing.
It kind of reminds me how a while back somebody posted proposed redesign of stackoverflow to make it more nice from UX perspective. However this person wasn't a user of stackoverflow and didn't understand how much value which features provide and suggested changes that would make very valuable features removed or made less easily accessible while bringing to the front features that are not very useful.
I think it just helps to be a user of the product and have a deep understanding for it before you make any changes. Elon used twitter a lot, but in pretty unusual fashion (because he's world famous billionaire) so he really didn't understand what's most valuable part and took it for granted.
It's really a bit surprising that noone told him that his tweets are worth anything only because people reading them can know they come from Elon not some guy who paid 8$ to call himself Elon on Twitter.
And it also doesn't take a genius to make changes a little slower and more conservatively. For instance, in this case they should have at least added ID verification (of the kind Facebook sometimes forces people to do), and only allowed people to verify their real names for $8.
It seems like Musk also got too used to people cutting him slack for his crap at Tesla and SpaceX, but those companies have mission narratives that people can "believe in." That's not the case for Twitter, and it's looking like Musk is going to slam into the ground without that net to catch him.
It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings. IIRC, Bad decisions like Musk's killed Digg, because Reddit was there to take the exodus.
This is what gets me. He's basically speedrunning a world-class demonstration of the lesson of Chesterton's fence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
As much as I want to see Mastodon succeed, I don't see it ever happening. Its biggest feature (multiple instances) is also the biggest reason most users are never going to use it. It's just too confusing for the end user. Also it's bizarre that the one instance that actually has the potential to gain mainstream interest (mastodon.social) is not accepting new invites.
I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.
This is particularly surprising to me also, for a different reason. Since Musk was a key player at PayPal, he should have learned that although the vast majority of users are well-intentioned and harmless, there are a small group of scammers and criminal who MUST be dealt with or they will rapidly bankrupt you.
On Twitter, we must add to the list of scammers & criminals the additional bots, trolls, and pranksters, all of whom can rapidly destroy trust in a community (online or off).
Why he didn't carry that lesson forward to this platform is baffling (unless he's in a contest with Kanye and the FTX crypto guy to see who can create the largest and most rapid-burning money bonfire).
1. Create a new Apple account
2. Buy a $10 iTunes gift card
3. Use that to pay for Twitter Blue
Would I pay $10 and twenty minutes of my time to knock $20bn off of an insulin profiteer's stock price? Absolutely. Put me down for a recurring subscription.
There also is mixed evidence that Eli Lilly's stock actually went down from the tweet, given it reacted hours after the tweet and never recovered (usually fake news items effecting price will immediately correct back to the previous trading level.)
Several articles I read about it bury this deep in the article, basically alluding to "we'll never actually know why the stock went down." I would imagine their new Alzheimer's drug looming had more to do with it, but idk. It also becomes slightly questionable about if a quant, etc fund would not know the difference between accounts, when you really think about it...it sounds improbable.
I'd be too worried about getting charged with wire fraud or something personally.
Getting verified previously with a small account was cumbersome and took ages.
I don't think good content is the core value of twitter. In my perception value of twitter is who said what. Good or bad.
I don't use twitter and have contact with twitter only when it's cited elsewhere and bulk of most popular citations are mostly not "here's interesting thought someone had on twitter" but rather "this celebrity/politician/office tweeted that".
But this twitter thing beginning to end has mostly been a disaster. I think he's mostly unfairly hated, in that almost any CEO is as bad or worse but he's his own worst enemy with twitter.
He's alienated a lot of people and then alienates them more by saying people should boycott thier products.
To be completely fair, this is my feeling about the web Twitter and especially Reddit UI.
It’s much worse than that. Selling the verification check mark to anyone with $8 poisoned the platform instantaneously.
It’s a bit like the DMV suddenly starting to sell driver licenses without any proof that you are who you say you are. Immediate erasure of the trustworthiness of any driver’s license, forever.
I cannot imagine that Musk was not aware or made aware of this consequence. He did it anyway.
Possibly after firing the people who warned him.
That's it. This whole debacle would've been instantly avoided.
It remains to be seen if learning has occurred.
Oh, Twitter is full of bots! So when I'm in charge I'm going to press the "no more bots" button and save Twitter! Also, the company only needs half this much staff, so we're going to spend a few days firing half of them and then the company will be better off!
Elon's not gonna learn because that would tarnish his image of someone who has any idea what the heck he's doing.
I'm aware of no less than 3 formerly verified individuals who did tell him[1] before the feature launched, and he responded by banning them for impersonating him and instituting a "no lying about who you are" rule that empirically works on an honor system, or upon pain of forfeiting $8.
1. "Showed him" would be more accurate, but he shockingly failed to grasp the point they were making.
But at least the blue check system was mostly correct. Imagine how much a blue check would cost if it was opened to the public and the level of verification pre-elon was used .
Right now the $8 was just a code change and let's just call it 100% profit. With actual verification you'd need a bunch more people and one of those identity verification services and now that $8 isn't pure profit
Not such a great system when a bunch of peasants convince themselves to believe in lies. "Everyone gets a voice to say damaging things" is the road to ruin.
The Twitter user base is massively non-Western. Within the West it skews non-White.
Your assertions are meaningless garbage and betray a complete lack of how Twitter works and who uses it, comprising merely the braying of the far-right greivance industry.
Extremely Fungible Tokens.
I'm amazed that people have already forgotten this.
Interested in reading more about this, do you have any links?
I see this a lot in redesigns, and it's always "oh people aren't using this thing that I think they should, it must be because they don't know about it" and not "it must not be what they want".
It's like that thing that people do when they come into the room and say "oh why are you sitting in the dark" and switch on the lights, without stopping to check why you're sitting in the dark. I know how to switch on a light, it's just that right now I'm loading a camera.
How was that not obvious? The current situation Twitter is in is the most naive prediction. If Mr. Musk needed someone to point this out to him and ask why it wouldn't go down this way, I'm not sure what to say. Hell, a bunch of comedians actually pointed this out by changing their names and avatars to Elon Musk and impersonating him. Elon banned them. It really should have clicked at this point.
Given how obvious it is, a more logical premise might be to assume someone did and Elon chose to believe otherwise.
In my ideal world, Twitter Blue would act as "identity verification as a service". Pay $X/month and provide some proof of identity linked to your display name on Twitter. If the two correlate, you get the check. I think identity could be fairly flexible- could be "I am John Smith", but also could be "I am CorpA" or "I am <Internet Identity>"
Verified accounts could then get priority display of tweets or replies. This cuts down on spam severely as now the barrier to getting high visibility tweets is $$$ AND verification.
What about profile name changes? That's why it's a monthly payment. Allow Y changes per month still subject to the same verification process
What is the cost of doing so? I feel (maybe naively), fairly small. I think verifying I am John Smith is super easy for non-notable people (no one is trying to impersonate you)- send a driver's license or recent bill and you are probably okay. For more notable people/corps, you will need to provide higher documentation but at the same time, that's a much smaller # of accounts (and currently done today)
How do you not bungle something you conceive, implement, and roll out to millions of users in 2 weeks (while in the middle of a massive wave of layoffs).
I also don't understand how it got to this bondoggle. I always imagined it was going to use the payment for verification: you can get a blue mark for John Smith only if you pay with a card belonging to John Smith. That can be automated in 2 weeks, no problem. And then add more complex verification procedures for companies, brands and non-name accounts.
I'm also reserving some probability mass for "we didn't get the whole story". Something like 25% that was an already verified account or something like that.
Eventually I suspect things will get fixed and Twitter will probably benefit from the attention. Twitter hasn't been this interesting in years.
I know there are many online services providing a similar service, not sure how secure they are, but obviously another option.
1 - https://www.canadapost-postescanada.ca/cpc/en/business/posta...
I've never been prompted to use it though, have you? in which context?
I can only speculate that he dropped the identity verification part to get this to market quicker as this is the part which would have required new investment/systems/vendors.
I speculate taking a payment would have been relatively low complexity for Twitter to implement and possibly could have leveraged existing internal systems.
I wouldn't be surprised if one day Elon suddenly announces everybody paying $8/mth now needs to submit identity docs to continue to use service.
1) All tweets
2) Tweets by paid accounts (low verification)
3) Tweets by official accounts (high verification)
Bonus points to filter content by 1st party client vs 3rd party tweet schedulers
Bad reporting right here. If you look at their stock chart this is far from an unusual movement. In just the last six months they’ve had several drops of 5% and at least one 10% drop. This is more than just bending the meaning of “damage”, long term investors won’t even notice and day traders will see this as the opportunity it is.
> By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. The Twitter stunt pulled down the stock price of other diabetes drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. Lilly’s stock has yet to recover and, on Monday morning, remained down more than 4% over the past five days.
the funniest part is when you actually follow that stock, you know why it's down, but then you read someone's twitter and they think the stock's down due some campaign or tweet :)
There are kind of two things that happened, here. One is a kind of rushed implementation of a questionable feature. The other is a breakdown of social taboo of just violating the law and/or acting in a damaging way.
We all know that spam and bots are rampant on the Internet. But people providing their valid credit card numbers to then impersonate another company for trolling purposes is something that could happen in lots of cases but held in check by people knowing they’d be sued or arrested/fined. Exactly like vandalism.
(And there’s maybe an ethical case to be made for direct action/civil disobedience, but legally that’s not a valid excuse so there’s definitely risk of being sued and/or arrested.)
This is why you can't open a bar without bouncers, or have an outdoor concert without on premise security. When you concentrate people together you simultaneously:
1. Increase the number of times you roll the dice with someone choosing to be harmful.
2. Increase the number of people within the blast radius (figurative or sometimes literal) of the bad actor who does.
You simply can't escape this fundamental law of human behavior. If you're building a system that aggregates people together—physically or virtually—you have an obligation to understand and deal with this.
A previous employer was pranked via impersonation that was far more elaborate and convincing than one fake tweet. The corporate lawyers were able to get the fake website taken down, but any legal action beyond that was quickly dismissed.
There's also the "empty pocket" problem; it's not like Eli Lilly is going to actually get $billions in compensation from some random person on Twitter. The lawyer time to draft the complaint would probably cost more than the best possible award they could expect.
Alternatively: this sort of thing will always happen because it has the potentially to be very funny
Ah yes, the patient's trust in the company to rip them off on lifesaving drugs
Just to be clear, you're proposing that "freedom" means "do what this corporations wants you to do or die".
If this were anywhere but Hacker News, I'd think you were joking, but... you're being serious, aren't you?
And let me guess: if a government says, "do what we want you to do, or die", that's regulation and therefore bad, because it's a government doing it, not a corporation?
SMH.
I have to imagine they're doing this for the continued exposure. There's no such thing as bad press and all that.
Alternatively phrased as after 3 days, only a mere 40% has been lost. Hits different though.
At worst, Eli Lilly would have had slightly higher interest rates on their next round of debt funding.
However, Friday also saw a broad drop in pharma stocks. If I'm quite generous I'd say 50% of that 2% can be attributed to the Twitter tomfoolery.
They also lose a lawsuit on the day of that tweet (and the drop was pretty typical for that day on the market) so I'm not really convinced their stock was altered much by a fake tweet.
>by Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. The Twitter stunt pulled down the stock price of other diabetes drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. Lilly’s stock has yet to recover and, on Monday morning, remained down more than 4% over the past five days.
So the article suggests its only recovered 20% of the fall.
And anyway what is a fair amount of value to lose over a fake tweet? is 1% ok? 2%?
> And anyway what is a fair amount of value to lose over a fake tweet? is 1% ok? 2%?
Given that when the stock prices return and continue to rise - there's no actual monetary losses... sure. Those are all fine. At worst, their interest rates on new loans would be a bit higher is all.
He must have been aware of verified accounts getting sold and used for scamming so maybe he wanted to dip into that instead of losing it to middleman.
I don't think we can assume he must have been aware of anything. That team was told to release it by November 9th or they were all fired or some such, right? so in a week and a half, release this new feature.
But maybe that's some genius plan with a spectacular outcome that I fail to see.
Like, if I create a fake verified Eli Lilly account on Twitter with no followers, how would anyone even see it? It seems like it would only get picked up and shared by people in on the joke.
Eli Lilly
@cutecatpics
Cute cat pics
@eli_lilly_official> Like, if I create a fake verified Eli Lilly account on Twitter with no followers, how would anyone even see it? It seems like it would only get picked up and shared by people in on the joke.
People would share it. Think: troll + random thing going viral. The troll gets the ball rolling, and not all trolls would succeed at that, but some would and after the initial push the ball would keep rolling on its own.
From the article:
>By Friday morning, Lilly stock had dropped by more than 5% from the day before. The Twitter stunt pulled down the stock price of other diabetes drugmakers, including Novo Nordisk and Sanofi. Lilly’s stock has yet to recover and, on Monday morning, remained down more than 4% over the past five days.
I'm not normally one to defend drug makers, but when you're talking about the loss of ~$15 billion in market cap[1], and then you factor in the fact that the company themselves was so frustrated by this that they walked away from their ad deal with Twitter, it all makes it hard for me to see how this is "overblown".
[1]https://gizmodo.com/twitter-eli-lilly-elon-musk-insulin-1849...
It seems much, much more likely the stock loss was part of a larger market event than a specific Twitter stunt.
So the negatives are definitely overblown.
If I have a significant following on my main/normal account, then I can create the fake one and then retweet it on main, thus showing it to all my regular followers. From there it just needs a little normal organic traction - and yes, that includes many people who immediately understand the joke and are RT'ing it because it's fake.
- If you look at after hours trading, nothing really happened. In fact, the stock actually had a strong up bar for a little bit.
- Also, since Eli Lilly posted an official tweet stating the news was fake within 3 hours, again we should have seen something in after hours trading, but there is nothing there. This is a huge amount of lead time before market open of the next day.
- A bunch of other companies all crashed at market open at the same time as Eli Lilly. Maybe you could argue that Eli Lilly fake news crashed all the pharmaceutical stocks, but CVS and Cigna which are healthcare, not pharma also crashed. Cigna lost over 10% compared to Eli's 6%. It doesn't add up that fake news on pharma Eli would punish healthcare Cigna even more.
Other similar companies that are not in the Insulin business in any way moved down by about the same amount at the same time. Eli Lilly's stock has mostly gone back up. Also the timing is off, the stock moved after open the following day, after other news was announced and not in line with the timing of the tweet's creation or growth in impressions.
Corporate Equality Index: List of Businesses with Transgender-Inclusive Health Insurance Benefits
https://www.thehrcfoundation.org/professional-resources/corp...
Elon Musk says he lost transgender daughter because of ‘neo-Marxists’ As the Tesla CEO explained in a new interview, he apparently sees no link between his controversial statements about gender identity issues and his daughter’s move to legally sever ties with him
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/10/10/elon-musk-says-he-los...
Twitter shouldn't ban people on behalf of a corporation; it has nothing to do with "woke" or not "woke". This is a problem with all media, advertising groups have formed mobs that intimidate organizations like Twitter, and other media outlets that don't give in to their corporate agenda. It might sound great that your agenda and the corporations agenda are aligned at this moment in time, but I assure you they are fair-weather friends. They wouldn't skip a beat stomping all over the LGBTQ+ agenda if it was profitable for them.
A world where groups of corporations control free speech through collective intimidation is literally a dystopian science fiction trope. So IMHO, it doesn't matter where you lean politically, screw Eli Lilly and others like them.
And a world where Eli Lilly is forced to advertise on Twitter is totalitarian. Their only agenda in this instance is not supporting fake news. They should be applauded.
- If you tweet n-word enough, you get banned. Same with too much calls for violence. But, the line is actually pretty low.
- Getting only little algorithmic advantage over liberals rather then a lot of ot.
The hate toward existing employees is kinda leaking from Musks feed. Not sure what that one is about, but I am sure they did not made his kid go no contact nor made his wife's divorce.
All that and zero downsides? That's a huge win in my book.
What a glorious shit show.
HN then modified it to its current ugly form.
This reasoning seems broken to me; the ability of a fake account to make a bogus announcement is not reduced by Eli Lilly withdrawing their ad spend. Pulling out of advertising on twitter because it's a dumpster fire makes sense. "Voting with your dollars" to show Twitter that their fumbles matter and they must do better can make sense. But I don't see how this drawdown would do anything to improve "patient trust and health."
Disclaimer: I have no idea what this guy is talking about.